The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (41 page)

Too much news for sure, and for the rest of the brief drive Dylan sucked his thumb as he hadn’t for years, but Sean didn’t reprimand him, just parked the truck so the two of them could study the one-story white clapboard house with the scruffy yard where a bicycle had lain on its side long enough that spears of iris had grown up through its spokes. If this had been an ordinary outing, Sean would have explained, “They built all these little houses on the west side for workers in the mill, and they don’t look like much maybe but they’re nice inside and the men were allowed to take home seconds from the mill and they made some beautiful cabinets in their kitchens,” because he likes telling the boy bits of the history of his hometown, but he kept that lore to himself and when the boy seemed ready they climbed the front porch steps together and stood before the door. “You want to knock or should I?”

“You.”

Sean used his knuckles, three light raps, and then Esme was saying through the screen to Dylan, “Hey you,” smiling her pained childish smile, and Dylan couldn’t help himself, he was hers, Sean saw, instantly, gloriously hers because she’d smiled and said two words. She held the door ajar and Dylan went past her into the house and he never did things like that—he was shy.

“Coming in?”

“I’ll leave you two alone. To get—”
Reacquainted
would strike her as a reproach, maybe. “So you can have some time to yourselves. Just tell me when to come for him and I’ll be back.” He paused. “His bedtime’s eight o’clock and it would be good if I got him home before that.” In case he needs some settling down. Sean doesn’t say that, or think about how he’s going to keep the boy
from telling his grandmother where he’s been, but he’ll find a way, some small bribe that will soothe the boy’s need to tell all.

“Not even two hours,” she said.

“It’s not a great idea to feed him a lot of sugar or anything, ’cause then he gets kind of wired.”

“I wasn’t going to,” she said. “I know how he is.”

“It would only be natural if you wanted to give him a treat or something.”

“To worm my way back into his affections.”

“Not what I meant.”

In her agitation she gave her wrist a punishing twist—no, she was fooling with the silver bracelet, and he suffered an emotion bruising but minor, too fleeting or odd, maybe, ever to have been named, nostalgia for a miserably wrongheaded sexual attraction. Not regret. He had repented for giving her the bracelet by bringing her kid to her. Had that really been his reason? He repeated, “Not what I meant.”

“So maybe you won’t believe this, I can see why you wouldn’t, but I wanted to see him so bad. Only I thought you-all would for sure say no. Blame me. Not, you know, trust me. And instead you’ve made it easy for me and I never expected that and I don’t know how to thank you, Sean, I don’t, but this means everything to me, it’s kind of saving my life. It’s really basically saving my life.” Running the sentences together, so unaccustomed was she to honesty, afraid, maybe, of the feeling of honesty, scary if you weren’t used to it, and Sean reached out to lay a finger on her lips, ancient honorable gesture for
hush now
, no further explanation was necessary, he got it that to see your child again was like having your life saved, he would have felt the same way in her shoes but also chastened and rebellious confronting someone like him who was doing the real work, constantly and reliably there for the boy, and he wanted to convey the fact that none of this mattered if she was here and could give the boy a little of what he needed, a sense of his mother: but now it was Sean who was inarticulate, moved
by the girl softness of her mouth, Sean whose finger rested against her lips until she jerked her head back and he was blistered by shame, the burden of impossible apology and regret shifting from her shoulders to his. He waited for her to say something direct and blaming, scathing, memorable, and when she did not he was relieved. But he wasn’t fooled, either. She knew exactly what had happened and where it left them. This girl believed she now had the upper hand, but must use her leverage tactfully, however unlike her that was, if he was not to instantly deny what had taken place. What he understood was that he was in trouble here, but that she was going to collude with him because, basically, he could give her more of what she wanted. The child. His agreement was necessary for her to continue secretly seeing the child. And Sean did not know how to set any of this right, only that he needed to keep his voice down and not do any further harm—not scowl in dismay or do anything else she could construe as a sign of problems to come. He told her, “Seven-thirty then, okay? See you at seven-thirty,” and she said in a voice in no way remarkable, “We’ll be here.”

But they were not. “She has rights,” Sarah told Sean, who was in her kitchen, in a rickety chair she had pulled away from the table, saying, “She has rights,” saying now, “It’s wrong for him to be kept from his
mother
the way you-all have done.”

For some reason, when she’d pulled the chair out for him, he’d taken it and turned it around and straddled it. Maybe he had needed to act, to take control of something, if only the chair. This is her sister—or closer than sister, twin—and he keeps his voice down. “Ask yourself why I brought him by. I’m her best friend in this mess, but what she’s done is damage her own cause. This isn’t gonna look good.”

“To who?”

“Do you know where she’s going?”

“To who won’t it look good?”

Trailer trash
, Daisy called the sisters once. “The thing is to make this right without having anybody else get involved.”

“You’re threatening me.”

“I’m the opposite of threatening you. I’m saying let’s work this out ourselves. You tell me where she’s gone and I find her and we work it out like reasonable people and there’s no need for anybody else to know she abducted a five-year-old child.”

“A five-year-old. You-all opened your door and
what’s in this basket? A cute little baby!
She wasn’t in labor eighteen hours. She never chipped a tooth from clenching or left claw marks on my hand. Tell me you ever even really knew she was in the house. Tell me you ever once really talked to her. Victor hit her upside the head so hard the ringing in her ear lasted a week. Do you know he said he’d kill her if she tried to leave? It was my four thousand dollars. So she ran, you know, she took the money and she ran and there was never any phone call and it kept me up a lot of nights. It wasn’t the money, it was not knowing she was all right—they say twins know that but I didn’t, not till I saw her again. And I never saw her look at anyone like she looks at that little boy when he says
I want to stay with you
and it’s not like she planned this but after that how was she going to let him go? I’m not saying she makes great choices but you were unrealistic thinking she could give him back.”

The chair wobbled as he crossed his arms on its backrest. “Maybe so. She and I need to talk about that. Work out what’s best for all concerned.”

“It sounds so reasonable when you say it.”

“I am reasonable.” He smiles. “Families need to work these things out.”

“Now you’re family.”

“Like it or not.” Still smiling.

Sarah gave in. Esme was driving north toward Arcata to go to college there. “None of you thought she was good enough for college.”

An outright lie but he let it go. “How long ago did they take off?”

“Not long. She had to get her stuff. She was just throwing things into the car. Dylan helped. Laughing like they were both little kids.” He continued to look at her. “Mmm. Twenty minutes ago maybe.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know kinds of cars.” He won’t look away. “Smallish. A Toyota maybe. Green maybe.” Not smiling now: he needs her to get this right. “Yeah. Green. A bumper sticker. Stop fucking something up. That really narrows it down, hunh. Trees. ‘Stop Killing Ancient Trees.’ Trees are her thing.”

“You’re sure about Arcata.”

“See, she’s wanted that for years, an apartment and classes and her little boy with her. Botany. Redwoods, really. Did you know that about her? She loves redwoods and there’s this guy there who’s famous, like
the
guy if you want to study redwoods, and she met him, and she might be going to be his research assistant this summer. She said—” But she’d told him what he needed to know and he was out the door. Lucky that it was north, the two-lane highway looping through the woods without a single exit for sixty miles and few places to pull over, lucky that after dark nobody drives this road but locals and not many of those. As long as he checks every pull-off carefully and doesn’t overshoot her then it comes down to how fast he can drive, each curve with its silver-gray monoliths stepping forward while their sudden shadows revolve through the woods behind, the ellipse of shadow-swerve the mirror image of his curve, evergreen air through the window, no oncoming lights, which is just as well given his recklessness, the rage he can admit now he’s alone, the desire just to get his hands on her, the searing passage of his brights through the woods like the light of his mind gathered and concentrated into swift hunting intelligence that touches and assesses and passes on because its exclusive object is her. At this speed it’s inevitable he
will overtake her—nobody drives this road like this—but now he’s bolted past a likely spot, a scruffy rutted crescent rimmed with trees tall enough to shade it from moonlight: there. He brakes and runs the truck backward onto the shoulder, passing an abandoned car whose color, in the darkness, can’t be discerned, and pulling in behind he reads
STOP KILLING ANCIENT TREES
. Such fury, such concentration, and he almost missed it. An empty car. Here is his fear: that she has arranged to meet someone. That Sarah was lied to, and Arcata was a fable, and there’s a guy in this somewhere, and she told him she would go away with him if she could get her kid. Nobody to be seen but when he gets out in the moonlight it was as if the air around Sean was sparkling, as if electricity flashed from his skin and glittered at the forest, as if he could convey menace even to a stone. When he checked in the backseat there was the boy curled up, sleeping in his little T-shirt and underpants with nothing over him, no blanket, not even an old sweater or jacket, and cracking the door open—its rusty hinges alarming the woods—Sean ducks into a cave of deepest oldest life-tenderness and takes the child in his arms and leans out loving the weight of him and the shampoo smell of his mussed hair. He sets him down barefoot and blinking, his underpants a triangular patch of whiteness in the moonlight, the boy as shy as if it was he who’d run away, keeping a fearful arm’s length from Sean, and when Sean says, “Where’s your mom?” blinking again, seeming not to trust Sean, confused and on the brink of tears and there’s no time for that. That was for later. “Get in the truck,” he tells the boy, “and I don’t want you coming out no matter what. Your job is to stay in the truck and I don’t want you getting out of that truck for any damn reason whatsoever, do you understand me?”

“I have to pee.”

“Come on then.”

Watching from behind Sean feels the usual solicitude at the boy’s wide-legged stance. Dry weeds crackle.

“She had to go pee in the woods,” he said. Solemnly: “My mom did, in the woods.”

That was a new one to the boy.

Sean said, “What happened to your clothes?”

“I threw up and she made me take ’em off and throw ’em out the window cause the smell was making her sick too.”

“All right, now you get in my truck and you
stay
in the truck. What did I just say?”

“
Stay
in the truck.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“
Stay
in the truck.”

He has to boost the shivering boy up to the high seat. Sean takes the flashlight from the glove box and checks to make sure the keys are in his pocket. He gestures for Dylan to push the lock down, first on the passenger side, then, leaning across, on the driver’s. Sean nods through the window but the boy only wraps his arms around himself and twists his bare legs together, and Sean remembers the old parka stuffed down behind his seat and gestures for the boy to unlock again and leans in and says, “Look behind the seat and there’s a jacket you can put on,” and his flash frames twigs and brambles in sliding ovals of ghost light, stroking the dark edge of the woods, finding the deer trail she must have followed. By now she had to be aware that he was coming in after her, and he took the shimmer of his own agitation to mean
she
was scared, and somehow this was intolerable, that she would be scared of him, that she would not simply walk out of the woods and face him. That he is in her mind not a good man, a kind man, but instead the punisher she has always believed would come after her, and whether he wanted to cause fear or didn’t want to scarcely mattered since that role was carved out ahead of him, narrow as this trail: coming into the woods after her he can’t be a good man. He can’t remember the last time he felt this kindled and all-over passionate, supple and brilliant, murderously
good
, and when his flash discovered her she was already running, but it took only two
long strides to catch her. She broke her fall with her hands but before she could twist over onto her back he had her pinned. If she could have turned and they could have seen each other it might have calmed them both down but this way, with her back under his chest, his mouth by her ear, he was talking right to her fear-lit brain and what he said would be permanent and he felt the exhilaration of being about to drive the truth home to her, and he said
What is the matter with you
and then
You took my kid
and she said
He’s not your kid
and he said
My flesh and blood
and they both waited for what she would say next to find out whether she had come to the end of defiance but she hadn’t.
If you take him away I’ll just come back
. Even now she could have eased them back from this brink if she had shown a little remorse and he was sorry she hadn’t and said
What do I need to do to get through to you
. She thrashed as he rolled her over and her fist caught the flashlight, sending light hopping away across the ground. In the refreshed darkness he reached for her neck and she was screaming his name as his hands tightened to shut off her voice. Where his flashlight had rolled to a halt a cluster of hooded mushrooms stood up in awed distinctness like tiny watchers. When she clawed at his face he seized her wrists and heard twigs breaking under her as she twisted. The twining silver bracelet imprinted itself on his palm: he could feel that, and it was enough to bring him to himself, but she did not let up, raking at his throat when he reared back, and now her despairing
Fuck you fuck you fuck you
assailed him, its echo bandied about through the woods until feeling her wrath slacken from exhaustion he rolled from her so she would know it was over and they fell quiet except for their ragged breathing, which made them what neither wanted to be, a pair, and as he sat up something nicked the back of his skull in its flight, frisking through his hair, an electrifying noncontact that sang through his skull to the roots of his teeth and the retort cracked through the woods and there was the boy, five feet away, holding the gun with his legs braced wide apart. Behind him rose a fountain of sword
ferns taller than he was. “Don’t shoot,” she said. “Listen to me, Dyl, don’t shoot the gun again, okay? You need to put it down now.”